October 2, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Yom Kippur
Don’t Let Your Joy Die on The Mountain Top
October 2, 2025 – 10 Tishri 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi wanted to find out who was best at doing conversions. They find a bear in the woods. The priest says let me give it a try. He comes back a few minutes later smiling. I told the bear how beautiful communion is, and he is coming to our mass this Wednesday morning. The minister says I’ll go next. He comes back a few minutes later smiling. I told the bear about the glory of Bible study, and he is coming to our class this Sunday at noon. The rabbi says let me give it a try. He doesn’t come back for a good long while, and when he finally does, he is bloodied, bruised, and bandaged. “In retrospect,” the rabbi says, “maybe it was not the best idea to start with circumcision.”
That joke has been around forever, but I bring it up now because the laugh line is no longer so funny. To care a lot about Israel and the Jewish people this past year has been heavy and hard. And then one day, Shira and I were listening to a podcast host named Mel Robbins, who has a lot to say about how to thrive emotionally in hard times. She observed that the world has its sorrows. And so often the sorrows of the world make us sad. We internalize that pain. She asked a simple question: what are some simple hacks that we can do at home, in our everyday life, that will change our mood; that will banish our sorrows; that will make us feel good and hopeful and optimistic.
She listed seven hacks, but one spoke to me most directly. I implemented it that very day. It concerns what we listen to when we do household chores. When we are in the kitchen chopping vegetables or doing dishes, what do we listen to? Mel Robbins used to listen to the news. But listening to the news made her sad. One day, she decided to run an experiment. Instead of listening to sad news, which made her sad, she would listen to happy music, to see if it would make her happy. She was delighted to discover that it did. She started listening to Motown. She started dancing while chopping her vegetables. Her day-to-day disposition was so much better and happier. Simple hack. Big impact.
Before hearing this podcast, whenever I did my two favorite household chores—doing the dishes or sorting and folding laundry—I would always listen to one of four podcasts about Israel. Call Me Back with Dan Senor. The Times of Israel. For Heaven’s Sake with Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi. Or Honestly With Bari Weiss. Listening to these podcasts made me well informed. And, for the most part, they made me sad. There was so much brokenness and suffering, for Israel and Israelis, for Gaza and Gazans, for the Jewish people facing ever-increasing incidents of antisemitism. Listening to these podcasts while doing dishes was mostly a downer.
After hearing Mel Robbins, I decided to switch it up. I decided to take her advice and listen to Motown. As you know, this past summer in Boston we had a number of heat waves. That inspired me, when first doing the dishes and laundry after hearing Mel Robbins’ podcast, to ask Alexa: Alexa please play Heat Wave. This is not the main point of this Rosh Hashanah sermon, but it turns out that there are two versions of Heat Wave. Martha Reeves & the Vandellas did an iconic version in 1963, and Linda Ronstadt did an iconic version in 1975. While doing the dishes and laundry, I would ask Alexa to play both versions. I was in a Heat Wave rabbit hole. I would listen to both Martha Reeves & the Vandellas and Linda Ronstadt sing Heat Wave to figure out which version I liked more, and of course the answer was yes. I was happier and filled with better energy listening to Heat Wave than when I listened to podcasts about Israel in the brutal two years since October 7.
And then of course came the guilt. I wondered, is it okay to listen to upbeat music instead of serious podcasts? Is joy okay? Is joy okay when Israel is still at war? Is joy okay when hostages are still languishing? Is joy okay when there is so much suffering in Israel and in Gaza? Is joy okay when antisemitism is on the rise? Is joy okay when Israel is increasingly isolated? Is joy okay given all the complexities in America?
I did a Tevya. On the one hand, my being depressed as a result of listening to a podcast does not help Israel, or Gaza, or America, at all.
On the other hand, does listening to upbeat music in my kitchen when the sorrows of the world are unfolding make me like Nero, the Roman Emperor who according to legend fiddled while Rome burned?
Suffice it to say, my kitchen and laundry practice in the months since the Mel Robbins podcast have been to swap out the sad podcasts for the happy music, to feel much better in the moment, and then to feel guilty about feeling better in the moment.
And then, with the High Holidays coming, I started re-examining an old, opaque friend: the story of the binding of Isaac, Genesis 22, that we read last week. The story itself does not change from year to year. But our world changes, and we change, and so we see things now that we never saw before. Reading Genesis 22 two years after October 7, I see things I never saw before that bear on our soul, our neshamah—what it is, and what it should be–in a time of sorrow.
How does the story end? The angel of the Lord tells Abraham not to harm Isaac. Isaac was not sacrificed. Isaac lived.
What is the deepest meaning of “Isaac was not sacrificed, Isaac lived?” Isaac’s name in Hebrew, Yitzchak, means laughter. Laughter could not be sacrificed. Laughter lived. Laughter had to live.
Not only does laughter have to live. But laughter has to live in circumstances that are not conducive to laughter. Isaac is named for laughter amidst deep darkness. Sarah’s infertility. The banishment of Ishmael and Hagar. The binding and near sacrifice of Isaac, where he saw, and could never unsee, that his father was prepared to do the deed. Even then, even with all that, laughter must live.
Meaning that there must be a Jewish imperative to feel joy in circumstances that are the polar opposite of joyful.
Our circumstances today are the polar opposite of joyful. We live in contentious, complicated, conflictual times. There are divisive issues: in Israel, in Gaza, in America. We don’t agree. Even generations in the same family, especially generations in the same family, do not agree. If there are 700 people here this morning, there are 700 different points of view on how we got here, and what to do to fix it. This is neither the time nor the place to get into the merits. But on Yom Kippur, I just want to acknowledge the obvious, that our world is in pain. So what do we do?
I think the message of Genesis 22 to us today is: preserve ourselves so that we have the energy to advocate for our point of view. Joy and laughter are not an escape from the real world. Joy and laughter will give us the strength to tackle the problems of the real world.
No one better embodies this energy of Isaac’s name than Israelis themselves. A few weeks ago, our Israeli nephew Yehuda got married to his bride Jackie in Los Angeles. Their loved ones felt the deepest joy. Now Yehuda comes from a big family in Israel. His Israeli family contains 53 members. 52 out of the 53 came to Israel for the wedding. For most of them, it was the first time they had been out of the country since October 7. The only one who could not come was Yehuda’s first cousin Yonatan, age 18, who is a commander of an infantry brigade currently in Gaza, and the IDF would not give him leave to go to the wedding. So many of his family members, in their 30s, had served two, three, four tours of duty, of miluim, in Gaza or up north. While they were in LA for the wedding, several got notices that they were being called up again, and when they got back to Israel, they were to go straight to their military base.
Yehuda is not a public speaker. He is, in the biblical idiom, not a man of words. But after the cantor sang im eshkachech yerushalayim, if I forget thee O Jerusalem, Yehuda made the first and only public speech of his life. He turned towards his family and said: You, my brothers, sisters and cousins, are doctors, scientists, teachers, lawyers, businesspeople. You are husbands and wives. You are parents of young children. You want to live your lives. You want to be with your spouse. You want to raise your children. You want to do your jobs. You want to live in your own home and sleep in your own bed. And yet, over the last two years, you have fought hundreds of days for Israel. Some of you are going back to fight again. I just want to say, before I break the glass, under our chuppah, that I will never forget Jerusalem. Thank you. I love you.
He shattered the glass, and the Israeli contingent danced all night long with every fiber of their being. Half the crowd were parents in their 30s. Half the crowd were little Israeli children, 3, 4 years old. Infants less than a year old. I learned something: that apparently there is no word in modern Israeli Hebrew for bedtime. If there is, these parents and these children did not know it. These little children did not go to bed at 7, 8, or 9. They danced on their parents’ shoulders, round and around, until at about midnight they collapsed from sheer exhaustion and fell asleep on the dance floor. Israelis did not let their joy die on the mountain top. Neither should we. Do not let your joy die on the mountain top. Do not let your laughter die on the mountain top. We need our joy and laughter to sustain ourselves for the long haul.
Which brings us back to heat wave.
In this new year, may each of us hear four voices. May we hear the voice of podcasts that keep us informed. May we hear the voice of music that keeps us dancing. May we hear the sound of the shofar that reminds us our mitzvah is to repair our broken world. May we hear the voice of laughter, Yitzchak, because joy is not only okay. Joy is positively essential if we are to sustain ourselves for the long haul.
The heat wave is not over. The heat wave is ongoing. What will you do, what joy will you find, to keep on going? G’mar chatimah tovah!